This invention relates to tracking and monitoring of assets along a transport route.
The locations of mobile objects such as cars and trucks, boxes containing merchandise, or even persons, can be kept track of by installing a GPS receiver and radio transmitter on the objects, such that they continuously or frequently transmit their identity and geospatial coordinates back to a centralized monitoring system (active mode), or transmit them when polled by a radio signal from the system (passive mode). However, conventional systems for tracking objects are generally not sufficient to be error-proof against spoofing or impostor objects. Phony transmissions can be sent and look-alike dummies can be presented. Thus, conventional asset-location reports typically cannot be trusted, database updates are questionable, and ultimately the information in the database about the assets cannot be trusted.